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Comment by Crazyontap | Hacker News Reader

This is a good extension but here is a cool hack I've discovered that let's you do this anywhere without any chrome extensions:

- Create a new whatsgroupp called 'ping self' and add your friend to it.

- Then kick your friend out from this group

- Open web.whatsapp.com and now you can access your messages, files, photos across any device anywhere, anytime! (telegram also does this and allows file up to 1gb)

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For the more limited use case of “get a link from a desktop to my phone right now” I have really enjoyed using an extension on the desktop browser that pops up a QR code linking to the current tab. Then I just point my phone camera at the QR code on the monitor to open the link on my phone. I like this setup because it doesn’t require any pre-configuration to link the desktop and the phone. Your friend sitting next to you can scan the QR code too.

I’m not linking to any specific QR code extension because I haven’t audited them for privacy but it’s easy to find one that claims to generate the QR code locally.

I use

  wl-paste | qrencode -s 20 -o - | display -

for this purpose. Shows the contents of the current Wayland clipboard as a QR code. For X11, replace `wl-paste` with `xsel -b`.

Oooh nice. Better yet, you can show that QR code directly in the terminal:

  qrencode -t ansiutf8 google.com

Looks identical. In WSL, you can use 'powershell.exe Get-Clipboard':

  powershell.exe Get-Clipboard | qrencode -t ansiutf8

I've replaced Pushbullet with Telegram as I already use it for daily communication.

Telegram's built-in "Saved Messages" is where I share links, files, text snippets, photos, etc. for follow up and archiving; seamlessly between my devices and the Telegram desktop app.

Telegram also has an export feature, so I can backup all (thousands) of saved URLs, messages, media files, and so on for offline safe keeping; both in human and machine-readable formats.

I use Slack for this, using a chat window with myself.

My issue is that whatsapp really compress the photos. But decent workaround.

What about SMS from desktop?

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